Let them dream
By Jesús Héctor Betancourt (2009)
Night falls on Teotihuacan
On top of the pyramid the boys are smoking
marijuana,
harsh guitars sound.
What weed, what living waters will give life
to us,
Where shall we unearth the word,
the relations that govern hymn and speech,
the dance, the city and the measuring
scales?
The song of Mexico explodes in a curse,
a colored star that is extinguished
a stone that blocks our doors of contact.
Earth tastes of rotten earth.
Octavio Paz, “Hymn among the ruins” (fragment)
Translation by William Carlos Williams
(1948)
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The Hymn
Mexico, my country, my people: The
country where first the races blended with their cultures –food, music,
spirituality- is now searching to understand its maturity, to answer the
questions deep inside our history. Once again, Mexicans are asking themselves Why?. This is an epoch for questions,
and so will be this reflection about a reality that is shaking my country as nothing before in the last 80
years of relative peace, the War on Drugs. Is the price for the present war to
clash our freedom and create a police state? We do not understand how (in our
quest for a better standard of living) did we arrive to this moment that is
putting on risk the freedom fought by our grandfathers for we to enjoy with relative comfort and peacefulness until
now.
My Mexico: A dream of harmony and
freedom in the heart of the land where the first clash of civilizations began.
You, boys in the top of Teotihuacan, smoking marijuana: you were dreaming of
that, weren’t you? When Octavio Paz wrote this poem Hymn among the ruins, more than 60 years ago, he was asking the
same: where are our dreams heading above these ruins: so many bones, and flesh,
and blood. Is it a crime to dream, to sing, to imagine a better world in the
top of a pyramid? Why do this alienated society cynically allows alcohol and
tobacco, while condemns the pleasures of the ones that smoke pot?
Since this weed arrived with the
Spanish conquerors, marijuana has been part of Mexican culture for more than
500 years. It has been smoked since then by the farmers and the shamans, and
also by a plethora of artists, writers, and even politicians. Also, it has been
used as a medicine for many purposes before it was prohibited its sale and
commerce in our communitarian markets as any other herb. Marijuana is the theme
of one of the most popular songs, La
cucaracha, which dates from more than a century ago –long before this herb
was satanized by the moral prosecutors that forbid its commercial use. Why did
this prohibition contributed the making of Mexico as one of the most violent
places in the world? Far away from my land I can see the horror shaking its
cities, the so-called War on Drugs, when it has claimed more than 10,000 lives
since it began a little more than 2 years ago. The herb itself is innocent - so
are the consumers. You can’t criminalize something that is int the core of
one’s culture: like wine in the Christian countries, marijuana plays a
role in the cultural and social habits
of many people in Mexico.
The ruins
But
I want to ask: Who created that monster enterprises which are the drug cartels,
the ones who –according to the CIA- employ directly and indirectly more the
450,000 people alone in Mexico? If in the shadow of that number of men and
women there are also their families, communities, making a living because of
this illegal trade, then we are talking about millions of people who are
related to this war, including many soldiers fighting against their own
brothers. So it happens that this war is against ourselves. It is difficult to
know someone in Mexico who is not related to anyone having a drug-addict in its
family, or who knows a friend, a neighbor, or whatever, which is related to
this business. Certainly, it is a very big business that has evolved wit the
help of all of our traditional and centuries-long corruption, which alone is
the only cause that we are still and undeveloped country even after such a progress
in so many ways, and Mexicans suffer the stigma of a second-class citizenship
in the global arena. This problem grew bigger with the help of many corrupt
officials, governors, judges, lawyers, policemen, and ministers, who have
benefited themselves of this prohibition, not only the drug traffickers.
When we hear in the media the official
standpoint about this War against Drugs, we listen the political correctness
and hypocrisy behind the fact that drugs harm an individual’s health; but the
government and media most of the times omit that this prohibition that led to
this war itself has brought an even greater damage of the entire Mexican
society, which is also becoming sick. It is not only drug trafficking and the
drugs themselves (that instead of disappearing, they are becoming increasingly
popular): it is organized crime, black businesses, the smuggling of weapons
through our porous borders, and the promise of easy money among the most
vulnerable and marginalized sectors of our youth. It is violence. For many
people drug trafficking is the only way to get rid of poverty. They have seen how
drug traffickers have been respected by the society when they become rich, how
they are the idols of so many popular songs, even to the point that some of
them became legends with an aura of heroism after their deaths in many small
towns in the rural heartland of Mexico.
With more fear than clarity, our
society is waking up in the violent morning of this new century, where trust
among citizens and paranoid thinking has replaced the most basic matters of
coexistence in many cities, especially along the US border. But nobody dares to
ask why there are consumers of all these illegal substances. Why do people want
to “escape” this way of living the American dream in our Mexican version by
using drugs? What are the faces of these users? Why do this society do not
encourage other ways of socializing, and intoxication is so common in our
troubled land?
The promenade
It
is Friday night in Coatzacoalcos. Facing the warm ocean, Francisco and Edith
kiss each other with candor and rapture at the same time. They seem not to care
about other people passing nearby, where they can watch a big oil vessel
arriving at the port. Along the seashore and in the promenade walk, there are
hundreds of youths walking, drinking beers at the side of their parked cars,
with the music of the stereo going out of them, and with the smell of snacks
here and there. Most of them seem to be happy. They do not know other place to
enjoy the nightlife than this. In the city, there are some exclusive bars, only
for the rich. For the rest, they have this promenade. This place is at the same
time the disco, the restaurant, the social stage and the community center.
Hiding at the back of the car,
watching that no policeman is coming close, Francisco lights a marijuana joint
and after giving a puff he rolls on the cigarette to Edith. Two, three smokes,
then they quench if off, before they start again to kiss each other. He is
about to leave her in two weeks. He is heading for el Norte, as they call
anything across the Northern border of this country, where he thinks he will
find a job. When they smoke, all the tension and the worries of not finding a
job for so many months, is gone for some moments, and they see each other’s
eyes, they feel the silence between their mouths, and conscience of their heart-bits
arrive gradually. The smell of the sea gets deeper, and so the sensation of
solitude and despair, which they want to avoid with the help of another hug,
another kiss.
A few blocks near the center of this
place, the only theater of the city, languishes in decadence with no
infrastructure to handle nothing, almost in ruins. The smog of the nearby
refinery covers the city even in the windy days. The oil refinery is the main
cause why this once sleepy small fishing port became a city of more than half
a million inhabitants in less than 30 years. The effects of this industry are
seen in in the river which is now dead at its mouth. It once had manatees and
even dolphins which entered on it to feed in the fish-infested banks of its
margins. Pollution has killed all faun in it.
Coatzacoalcos
is the place where Mexican famous Hollywood dive Salma Hayek was born. And in a
city where so many thousands of young people live, there is nothing more than
the promenade boulevard in the seafront with its more than 15 kilometers to
walk and drink beer and nothing else to do. There are no major sport centers,
not major cultural facilities, and the ones that are seem to be decadent and
ruined off. Instead of them, there is the glimpse of the neon-lighted shopping centers
that offer the same kind of shops than in any medium size city of the world:
cafes, fashion, beauty parlors, and nothing more.
Were are the place where the people
can interact between all: children, youth, adults and elders as well, all
together? What is the place of culture for the life quality of our society, in
the Development plans of our technocratic leaders that measure our status only
in terms of GDP and markets, as if a country were just money, an enterprise for
the political elites, not a whole compound of ideas, ideals, feelings, wisdom,
nature, history?
But Coatzacoalcos is not very
different from many of the cities of Latin America which have experienced
growth and expansion over the last 30 years. In the outskirts of its downtown,
a whole new compound of horrible housings stands new –with the least aesthetic
sense of what should be an urban planning-, so that most of them are abandoned
because no one wants to live there.
This is the story of so many towns,
so many cities, alienated by the way others decided that growth should be
achieved. Never in the history of humanity, a very few individuals had the
equivalent wealth of such great masses of poor people. The same few that have
decided the destinies of humanity and our planet without considering the
social and environmental costs of this model that now, in the present economic
crisis, threatens us to a major collapse.
This is the story of the pains of
our development, of our new “industrialized” status, of our “upper-high index
of human development”: a place where all of our traditional systems have been broken and replaced for modern ones that have made so many families
and villages migrate to the misery belts of our great cities and to the United
States. The present economic meltdown all around the globe is the harvest of
the loss of our basic feelings of solidarity because of this strong
individualism that is the signature of our epoch, consequence of the greed and
the insane love of money above so many other important aspects of a human’s
life. Frightened, we look now that for the
upcoming years another model is required, a model that should be inclusive for
all, constructed by all the people in the world. A model of survival with a global
point of view, and with a human face: where environmental and social forces
shall be the first priorities in the sense of our actions, without rejecting
our feelings, fears, desires and dreams. Our present time is in many senses the
good and bad dreams of our ancestors. So, don’t criminalize our marijuana
youths that smoke for a little daydream. Maybe they are dreaming of a better,
peaceful world.
Now it is Edith who lights the
joint. She is thinking deep inside of her that she really loves Francisco, and
she will wait for him until he comes back. Francisco smiles to hear. He
imagines he will live better in Isla del Padre, Texas, where a friend of him
has managed to contract him as a cook assistant in a Mexican restaurant. He
says that he will work hard and buy a home. She dream of working in something
related to her career, tourism administration. After a long silence… why to
worry about tomorrow? The perfumed smoke of cannabis arises in the night and
they continue kissing each other, from time to time saying to each other words
of love. Let them dream.
(Jesús
Héctor Betancourt – Echo Magazine #52 – Indian Institute of Mass
Communication. New Delhi, May, 2009). Image: http://tychy.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/a-cigarette-in-the-bath/
